Im not at all a fan of the term Cultural Marxism, which gives off a massive whiff of anti-Semitic conspiracy-mongering. I never use the term.
However, the fact that the far right speak about alleged analogies between Marxism and more current ideological trends in a very mystificatory and misleading manner doesnt mean that the more extreme and authoritarian ideological tendencies and practices in the Occident of today dont have any analogy whatsoever with Marxism.
This selective reading of Marxs and Engels The Communist Manifesto will pinpoint and elaborate upon some of these problems.
First of all, after the gripping opening prose-poem A spectre is haunting Europe, Chapter I begins with the following words:
The history of all hitherto existing society is the history of class struggles.
It seems that here, Marx and Engels are at least somewhat realistic in their views; human history is not a cotton-candy fairy tale of unmitigated bliss. There is no anachronistic and irredeemably pious petit-bourgeois cant about tolerance (God forbid there should be any classical toleration instead!) or celebrating diversity (humanity forbid anyone should provisionally suspend judgment on the relative value of any particular identity or worldview!). It is tempting to suggest that if Marx and Engels were here today, the rootless, sugar-sweet, sickly wheedling of idle humanitarian sentimental would meet with their disapproval also.
However, there is a curious iron here. The word hitherto is a bit of a giveaway. As is well known, Marx and Engels postulated an End of History no less whimsical and Quixotical than that of Fukuyama. And as is well enough known, Marxs late work from his deeply embittered old age, Critique of the Gotha Program (and when was he ever not embittered?) clearly and unequivocally states that the channel to paradise is paved with torrents of blood and torment.
Is this not also the case of authoritarian, post-liberal IdPol? On the one hand, social justice warriors and regressive leftists see all life in radically agonistic and zero-sum terms. White folks and POC, Zionist and anti-Zionist, Jew and Palestinian, capitalist and the-right-kind-of-worker (the ideologically correct one!)
Or in a word: Oppressor and oppressed
Such shall it ever be, world without end.
And yet, at the same time, such ideologues are curiously solutions-orientated, in the sense that the Party of Justice, and they alone, have the correct panaceas to reconcile such conflicts; and to bring about, either a material world that is purged from all suffering, or at least a spiritual one: to wit, the realm of symbolic violence, i.e. of the violence of language and discourse, is to be purged and cleansed entirely of the slightest traces of coercion and exclusion.
For sadly, the very idea that such violence is intrinsic to human communication or (Foucault forbid!) The Human Condition, is at most tokenistically acknowledged; it is but very rarely treated as something of practical significance.
Thus, while Marx and Engels emphasized, or even over-emphasized the role of conflict and violence in history, thereby avoiding the naivety of a certainly unreconstructed or nave humanitarian liberalism; so also do IdPol ideologues.
And while Marx and Engels believed that despite the hitherto-history with which they had to content, there was still substantial grounds for hope that they would one day manage to tie up every loose knot, on account of their superior knowledge, their mystical insight, and their resplendent virtue; so also do IdPol ideologues present themselves not only as liberators, but as bearers of a liberation not merely radical, but well-nigh absolute in character.
For what could be more infinite and unbounded in its bliss and bounty for any over-fastidious anarchist-emperor, than replacing the Ancien Regime of individual-truck-and-trade-offs between different forms of symbolic violence; with a Brave New Spiritual Economy of a language and discourse purged, renewed, resurrected in snow-white robes of gold, singing hymns of joy and glory evermore to the Saviors of the Weak and Weary?
And yet, more. In chapter 3, we are graced with the following charming and ennobling words:
The French Socialist and Communist literature was thus completely emasculated. And, since it ceased in the hand of the German to express the struggle of one class with another, he felt conscious of having overcome French onesidedness and of representing, not true requirements, but requirements of Truth: not the interests of the proletariat, but the interests of Human Nature, of Man in general, who belongs to no class, has no reality, who exists only in the misty realm of philosophical fantasy.
Similarly, IdPol apologists are ever posturing and pontificating regarding the misleadingly ideological character of Humanity. Now, certainly, their anti-humanitarianism is laudable, in the sense of their faltering, twilight-stumbling rejection of nonsensical imperative to sacrifice the interests individuals to an imaginary Good of Humanity which is merely a cover for the abusive behavior of the ruthless perpetrators of humanitarian aggressions in the Balkans, Afghanistan, Syria, and elsewhere.
But to be one-sidedly anti-humanist, in the sense of rejecting the perfectly laudable notion that the business of human beings is the business of human beings? Now that is surely not the same thing!
And yet, doesnt Marxs own self-anointing ex cathedra arrogance sound familiar? Not unlike the petit-bourgeois intellectual bureaucrat par excellence himself, social justice warriors boast of having somehow overcome the partisan biases of unreconstructed humanists, vulgar liberals and nave and primitive (!) modernists
So, instead of the dry, dusty, hand-me-down manna of the classless subject, let them gorge upon the heavenly nectar of the subjectless subject instead!
Ultimately, as Karl Marx himself once said:
History repeats itself. The first time as tragedy, the second as farce.
Regressive Leftist IdPol, just like Marxism, offers a magic bullet for the wounds of liberalism.
But the fact its self-appointed apothecaries make modest claims about their toxic brews, in order to make them a little sweeter to the cynic and less septic to the skeptic, does not make their infallible fallibility, their dogmatic scepticism, or their rigid dynamism, any the less buffoonish.
* Jonathan Fergusons freelance journalism includes, but is not limited to, his two guest blogs: at Times of Israel, he presumtuously aspires to be an honest broker on the Israel/Palestine issue, while at Sputnik, he has a nice salty mug of McCarthyite tears, with a few Far Center Fauxlib vanilla sprinkles for extra sweetness. He has zero love for Humanity and has no regard whatsoever for the National Interest. And like you, he has just about enough good sense to know that all this callous indifference and nihilism of his as far removed from actual selfishness as you could possibly ever get.
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IdPol: The Bastard Grandchild of Marx's Ressentiment - Being Libertarian
